Becoming Vigilant Subjects argues that practices of vigilance are key to forming individual subjectivity. Examining historically and culturally diverse case studies, the authors show how individuals develop their own vigilant selves in response to being observed by (often powerful) others – be they present, absent, or imagined. The book shows that it is in the interplay between this assumed observation and individual watchfulness that subjectivity emerges. It proposes vantage points for researching the nexus between vigilance and subjectivation, which, so far, is an understudied topic in the humanities and social
sciences.
